With all their enthusiasm, the travellers felt their eyes "get
out of gear," as Ardan said, like those of a man blind from his birth
and suddenly restored to sight. They could not adjust them so as to be
able to realize the different plains of vision. All things seemed in a
heap. Foreground and background were indistinguishably commingled. No
painter could ever transfer a lunar landscape to his canvas.
"Landscape," Ardan said; "what do you mean by a landscape? Can you call
a bottle of ink intensely black, spilled over a sheet of paper intensely
white, a landscape?"
At the eightieth degree, when the Projectile was hardly 100 miles
distant from the Moon, the aspect of things underwent no improvement. On
the contrary, the nearer the travellers approached the lunar surface,
the drearier, the more inhospitable, and the more _unearthly_,
everything seem to look. Still when five o'clock in the morning brought
our travellers to within 50 miles of _Mount Gioja_--which their
spy-glasses rendered as visible as if it was only about half a mile off,
Ardan could not control himself.
"Why, we're there" he exclaimed; "we can touch her with our hands! Open
the windows and let me out! Don't mind letting me go by myself.
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